After graduating from Wadham College, Oxford, Martin Mauthner assisted Randolph Churchill with his biography of Anthony Eden and the first volume of Randolph’s life of Sir Winston. Martin’s later career was as a senior information official of the European Union. His work involved public speaking, radio and television interviews, and organising exhibitions. The late Sir Martin Gilbert said of Martin’s German Writers in French Exile, 1933–1940 (2007), ‘He uncovers a lost era in European literary history, and brings it powerfully to life; a magnificent depiction of remarkable individuals, their tribulations and their creativity.’

Before Hitler comes to power Otto Abetz is a left-wing Francophile teacher in provincial Germany, mobilising young French and German idealists to work together for peace through Franco-German reconciliation and a united Europe. Abetz marries a French girl but after 1933 succumbs to the Nazi sirens. Ribbentrop recruits him as his expert on France, tasking him with soothing the nervous French, as Hitler turns Germany into a war machine. Abetz builds up a network of opinion-moulding French men and women who admire the Nazis and detest the Bolsheviks, and encourages them to use their pens to highlight Hitler’s triumphs.

In 1939 France expels Abetz as a Nazi agent. The following year he returns in triumph with the German army as Hitler appoints him as his ambassador in Paris. During the war Abetz (apart from ‘securing’ works of art and playing a role in the deportation of Jews) manoeuvres three of his French publicist friends – Jean Luchaire, Fernand de Brinon, Drieu la Rochelle – into key positions, from where they can laud Nazi achievements and denigrate the Resistance. A prime question the author addresses is why these writers, and two others, Jules Romains and Bertrand de Jouvenel – all of whom had close Jewish family connections – supported the Nazi ideology.

At the war’s end Drieu commits suicide, while Luchaire and Brinon are tried and executed as traitors. Abetz, charged with war crimes, pleads that he has saved France from being ‘Polonised’, but a French court finds him guilty and he is imprisoned. Released early, he dies in a mysterious car crash – a saboteur being suspected of having tampered with the steering.

Hardback ISBN:

978-1-84519-784-1

Hardback Price:

£65.00 / $79.95

Release Date:

June 2016

Paperback ISBN:

978-1-84519-799-5

Paperback Price:

£27.50 / $42.95

Release Date:

December 2016

Page Extent / Format:

360 pp. / 234 x 156 mm

Illustrated:

Yes

Black Forest Camp Fires: Otto Abetz and the Sohlberg Circle

France’s ‘Realistic New Generation’: Jean Luchaire and His Notre Temps

From the Rhine to the Spree: Abetz Slides into the Nazi Morass

Count Fernand de Brinon: A French Journalist Becomes a Premier’s Confidante

‘With Words of Peace, He Prepares for War’: Brinon Interviews Hitler

Abetz Exploits French Veterans, and Prepares to Ensnare Jules Romains

‘Let’s Not be Beastly to the Boche’: Jules Romains’ Mission to Berlin

Romains Turns Against Hitler – and Clashes with PEN

The ‘Brown Network’: Abetz Launches a Charm Offensive

‘The Berchtesgaden Project’: Jouvenel Interviews the Führer

Was Jouvenel a Fascist?: The Sternhell Controversy

Sabotaging Hitler? Abetz Faces an SS Inquisition

From Reconciliation to Appeasement: Luchaire’s Notre Temps Moves Right

Financial Scandals, February Riots: How Drieu Becomes a Fashionable Fascist

A New Editor for the NRF: Drieu Takes over from Jean Paulhan

Goethe to Goebbels: Drieu’s Pilgrimage to Weimar and Berlin

Washington or Berlin? Laval and Brinon Diverge

‘We Have Chosen Our Camp’: Brinon Joins the Die-Hards

Drieu’s ‘Nouvelle Revue Allemande’: An ‘Unsavoury Fish Platter’

Jean ‘Louche Herr’: Press Führer of Paris

The Schloss that became a Château: The Flight to Sigmaringen on the Danube

On The Run: the Capture and Trial of Brinon, Luchaire and Abetz

Aftermath: Gallimard Faces the Post-War Purgers

While Francophile German Otto Abetz sought peace and a united Europe before Hitler’s rise to power, he later managed to become Hitler’s ambassador in Paris. Mauthner uses Abetz as his anchor for this book which follows his previous German Writers in French Exile 1933-1940. He concentrates on the five writers Abetz manipulated before and during the war to promote the Nazi point of view (two of whom along with Abetz fled France for Germany in 1944). Mauthner’s interest in the writers resides more in their political service than literary merits, not least when it suited both Paris and Berlin to bypass their own diplomats and rely on journalists as intermediaries. He aims to learn why writers with Jewish family connections would support the Nazi cause, and asks the question: Should writer’s lives be considered when appraising their work? Protoview.com

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